Exodus 17:3-7
Psalm 95:1-2, 6-9
Romans 5:1-2, 5-8
John 4:5-42
“Give me a drink.”
This simple phrase spoken to the
Samaritan woman seems to be a simple request from the Lord for a drink of
water. At the noon hour, surely the Lord was hot and thirsty from traveling.
But there is much more to those four simple words. As He says to her, “Give me
a drink,” He is really beginning to show her - and all of us - the desire that
God has for us to be in union with Him.
In the Old Testament, nearly
every instance of a man and woman coming together at a well resulted in a
marital union, so for this scene to take place at a well is meant to evoke in
the mind of the reader a marital context – the union of a husband and wife
being analogous to the union of the soul with God. This meeting at the well, as
the Catechism so beautifully puts it, “is the encounter of God’s thirst with
ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him” (CCC, 2560). This image of
thirsting is intentional. Every one of us knows what it means to be thirsty and
every one of us knows the feeling of having our thirst quenched by a good cold
drink. To have experienced thirst is universal, a sign that every person is
able to understand the longing that God has for us personally. To quote Fr.
Joseph Langford, MC:
As a burning desert
yearns for water, so God yearns for our love. As a thirsty man longs for water,
so God longs for each of us. As a thirsty man seeks after water, so God seeks
after us. As a thirsty man thinks only of water, So God thinks constantly of
us: “Even the hairs of head are all numbered” (Luke 12:7). As a thirsty man will
give anything in exchange for water, so God gladly gives all he has, and all he
is, in exchange for us: his divinity for our humanity, his holiness for our
sins, his paradise in exchange for our pain (Mother Theresa’s Secret Fire, 77).
“God proves his love for us,” says St. Paul, “in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for our sins”
(Romans 5:8). Not after we had repented, not after we had
straightened out our lives and gotten on the right track, but while we were
still sinning. This is the love He has for us. This is the longing that He has
for us.
And just as God longs for our
hearts to turn to Him, so too do our hearts long to be with Him. As the Lord
speaks to the woman about the living water, the Holy Spirit, you can feel the
longing that she has to receive that gift. She cries out, “Sir, give me this
water!” In the same way, our hearts also are crying out to receive God, but the
thing is that we often fail to realize it as such. We feel a longing for
something and, in our sinfulness, try to fill is with so many things around us.
Like the Israelites who thirsted for water, we can often try to fill up the
longing of our hearts with things that are good. We try to find fulfillment in
the latest and greatest technology, sports or hobbies, the accumulation of money
or possessions, and the company of good friends and family. These things, while
not bad in themselves, never bring us true fulfillment. Like the woman at the
well, who lived a life of sin, we also sometimes turn to those things that are
not good for us, yet we still hope will bringing fulfillment – abuse of alcohol
or drugs, viewing pornography and self-abuse, and promiscuity, to name a few.
These things too fail to fulfill the thirst of our hearts. The only thing that
fulfills us, the only thing that will bring us peace is to know the God who is
Love.
And so we gather here once more
at this altar of sacrifice, the place where God’s love is made manifest once
more and He gives Himself to us in the Eucharist – the ultimate sign of His
love – and we hear Him speaking to us today: “No matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake. Come to me
with your misery and your sins, with your troubles and needs, and with all your
longings to be loved. I stand at the door of your heart and knock. [Harden not
your hearts. Rather,] Open to me, for I thirst for you” (Secret Fire, 136).
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